racing season

I'm getting all excited gearing up for the Kansas City Half Marathon this weekend. I haven't run in a road race for four or five years. And the last time I did a half marathon was in college, probably 15 years ago. This one will be cool because it's a real pretty course, and it's projected to be a perfect fall day.

I'm doing this one as a training run. I'm going to try to keep it slow, and take the usual one-minute walking breaks for every three minutes of running.

This is the plan for the rest of the spring and winter, as I move into the really long run phase of my marathon training. To keep from getting bored on the long runs, I'm going to run half marathons as part of them. It just so happens that there are races scheduled for all but one of the long-run days penciled in on my calendar. I'm going to do one in Olathe, another in Tulsa, and then this weird one in Springfield, where you can keep running around a 5k loop for as long as you want until you hit a marathon (I'm going to stop at 23 miles).

Also, the training program I'm following calls for me to run 26 miles one month before the Austin Marathon. So I figured, hell, if I'm going to do that, I might as well run a real marathon. So I'm seriously considering doing one in Mobile, Alabama, in January. So I'll actually wind up doing two in a month's time.

Sounds kind of crazy. But fun.